


starved

by hellbrain420



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-17
Updated: 2013-03-17
Packaged: 2017-12-05 13:37:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/723879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellbrain420/pseuds/hellbrain420
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Unhappy apocalypse kids who can't be expected to cope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	starved

Yours is an awful hunger. 

Not bestial or sickening, not spiraling or boundless. You have lost your tongue for adjectives. This hunger that grips you, has gripped you for all of you memories, is nothing more than awful. 

It is a survival trick, Dirk tells you one night when he has been awake so long he is abstract. He explains how you give it, the hunger, a human descriptor so as that you two may be equals. You agree; allowing your hunger to transgress humanity would ruin you. Something human can be fought and something human is awful. 

Fifteen years and you have only ever eaten tough vegetables and fish. You down alcohol, at first just for the calories, and then just to get from day to day in sanity. Fifteen years and your eyes are already yellowed in jaundice. A colony-wide practice, though, resorting to your liquor cabinet for calories. Nobody likes to drink but water gives you no strength. Fifteen years and everything you know is illness. 

*

Such irony makes you shake. Your best friend, heiress to a baking empire. You, wasting away in the middle of the ocean, nothing in your belly but seaweed and pumpkin seeds. You yell at Dirk about it, then apologize hours later. You give him a big, sloppy Internet kiss for putting up with your bullshit. 

You refuse to tell anybody about the extent of your problems. You’re not a charity case (and even if you’d sort of like to be, there’s no way they can help). Once or twice a year, Sawtooth will show up at your door with an armful of food from Dirk and you take it all and thank him—you know this gesture means he’s going to go hungry for a few days as he carefully calculates how to make up his losses. You can’t tell him that the strongest thing you’ve ever eaten was a pickle and it made you throw up. Soda, chips…you have never eaten carbohydrates. You can’t have his food, nobody here can, because it would tear your delicate stomach apart. You thank him and put these pounds and pounds of nutrition in the compost pile and pray this crop of vegetables will be juicer than the last.

Dirk is terribly controlling over his food. You know he has ordered it all up neatly, has running calculations on how much he can eat a day to survive to fifteen. He scares you sometimes with his intensity that the food system needs to be perfect. You can understand that he has control over precious little else and that he probably needs this like he needs to breathe. If you told him the fate of the food he carefully squares away from his stash to offer you, he’d be furious. And if you were to refuse him with no explanation, you would make him feel useless. He doesn’t want you to, but you know he already feels useless enough as is. 

So after deliveries you can’t talk to him, just can’t, and you go to the past. You tease Jane and make bad jokes with Jake. You try to press the cramps out of your body as you type. 

*

Your mother left you recordings and videos of herself teaching you how to speak and read and write, in English and in French, as well as instructions on how to play the violin. You’re falling behind on your French; in the end of the world, there’s nobody else to speak it with. For comfort, you watch the videos long after you become linguistically fluent. She died four hundred years ago and there she is, on a wavering screen. You admire her fashion sense. 

Sometimes you cry as she explains verb conjugation. Sometimes you scream at her as she diagrams a sentence. Some days, you only want to hug her and never leave her side. You want to be the perfect daughter, somebody she’s proud of, and play violin with her and let her interest you in reading. Other days, you hate her so, so much. She disgusts you. This woman with immaculate knowledge of the future…there is no way she didn’t factor in the result of leaving you the liquor cabinet. That isn’t love, that’s ancestral sabotage. 

No matter what you do, she just drones on with her lesson. Gaze level, hair pushed out of her face, hands either folded across her waist or writing something. You wish she had left you something a little more personal to connect to her over. Maybe short video journals of things she did. Lists of things she liked. Little things that would ultimately be completely useless to you. 

You slowly realize that she probably did leave you a personal connection. 

How else can you excuse the alcohol?

*

When you were very, very small—not to say that you have grown a whole lot—you had food. Your ever-considerate mother, in possession of a killer foresight, left the house stocked with food. It looked like so much, you remember, just mountains and mountains. The carapaces that had found you and brought you into the house were stunned by it. They got spastic and excited in the way that carapaces do. But even though it looked like a lot, it was just enough so that you would be able to survive until you entered the game in relative comfort and health. 

Of course, the catch to your personal well-being would mean not sharing your pantry. 

You shared. You shared and shared and shared. You considered your full belly but only had to look out the window to see the bodies of the starved set to drift in the ocean. In a few small years, you gave away every last bit of food. And then, you got hungry. 

To find dirt to grow plants, you had to go through hell. The water purifier was nothing more than scrap, scarcely working, so once you did get a garden scraped together, many plants shriveled. You could eat fish if you could catch them and find something left to make a fire with to cook them over. Catching gulls was out of the question; too hard, and the meat too rich for your palate. Seaweed was always an option, but the stuff was rank. It made you gag. 

At nine years old, you opened the liquor cabinet and read the label on the back of the first bottle you could reach. Calories, it said. The bottle had calories and you need calories. You had no idea, still have no idea, about how damaging alcohol could be. Now your friends joke that you could drink any of them under the table and you go along. You can’t. You barely five foot three, not even one hundred pounds, nothing in your stomach, and all you need to get drunk is a bottle of beer. 

When the carapaces drink, they grow melancholy. They slow down and cower and twitch. You don’t do much better. 

You’ll sometimes beg Dirk wildly to make you get rid of the alcohol and when he tells you to pour it all in the ocean you’ll snap that without it you’d die. You back him into a corner and scream at him while he stays quiet. Eventually, he logs off and you are left alone and wild.

(It sometimes feels nice to blame the hunger for yourself, though.)


End file.
